May 2018

Automatic Model Tuning with Amazon SageMaker is now Generally Available. With this feature, Amazon SageMaker can automatically tune your model by adjusting thousands of different combinations of algorithm parameters to arrive at the most accurate predictions the model is capable of producing.

You can now easily create new training jobs based on existing ones through the Amazon SageMaker console. Cloned jobs use the same configuration such as the selected algorithm, the IAM role, and the input mode to save time when setting up multiple jobs.

This Quick Start deploys AWX on the AWS Cloud, for users who want to run and manage an Ansible infrastructure on AWS.

The Media Analysis Solution is a reference implementation that helps customers process, analyze, and extract meaningful data from their audio, image, and video files. The solution combines Amazon Rekognition, to provide highly accurate object, scene and activity detection; facial analysis and recognition; and celebrity detection in videos and images, Amazon Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition service, and Amazon Comprehend, which provides automatic transcription of audio files and extraction of key phrases and entities from transcripts, to quickly and seamlessly obtain key details from their media files in their AWS accounts without machine learning expertise. The solution also includes a web-based user interface that customers can use to upload and search their media files in their AWS accounts.

Amazon SageMaker now comes pre-configured to run Chainer in a Docker container, adding to the existing integrated Tensorflow and Apache MXNet deep learning framework containers currently available. Chainer is a popular deep learning framework that supports a variety of neural architectures where the network is defined dynamically in a “define-by-run” scheme. This means you can fully leverage Python constructs and control flows in your network. To quickly get started with Chainer, Amazon SageMaker provides sample notebooks for common workflows such as sentiment analysis and MNIST, by example, easily accessible within the Jupyter Dashboard Interface from Amazon SageMaker. 

AWS Step Functions is now a HIPAA eligible service. You can now use AWS Step Functions to orchestrate distributed applications and workflows containing healthcare-related information, including personal health information (PHI) of users, and information subject to U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

PostgreSQL 11 Beta 1 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 11 on Amazon RDS. 

Starting today, Amazon QuickSight will offer pay-per-session pricing, a first among business analytics services. With pay-per-session pricing, you can enable everyone in the organization with interactive, data driven dashboards and pay only when users access these dashboards. This makes Amazon QuickSight an even more cost-effective way for you to make personalized business analytics available to everyone, whether you have tens, hundreds, or thousands of users. Pay-per-session pricing starts at $0.30 per session, up to a maximum of $5 per user, per month, and is available in Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition in all supported AWS regions. With pay-per-session pricing there are no upfront costs, no annual commitments, and no charges for inactive users.

Today we are adding Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to our list of HIPAA Eligible Services.

Amazon Redshift improved Short Query Acceleration (SQA) by automating the maximum time-out setting for short queries. On Nov 20th, 2017, we announced SQA which uses machine learning algorithms to predict the execution time of a query, and move short-running queries to an express queue for immediate processing. In the past, SQA needed user defined 'maximum run time' (between 1-20 seconds) to identify short queries. With this update, by setting the maximum short query run time to 'dynamic,' you can let Redshift automate this setting. In addition, SQA’s improved machine learning algorithm adapts the maximum run time to the changing workload, making it easier to use to minimize short query queuing time and increase throughput.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces the addition of an eighth Edge location in Tokyo, Japan. The addition of another Edge location continues to expand CloudFront's capacity in the region, allowing us to serve increased volumes of web traffic.

For a full list of CloudFront’s global network, see the CloudFront Details webpage.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets now allows you to create multiple execution roles in target accounts. This allows you to control resource types users can create or update in their stack sets. For example, you can restrict a group to create or update only Amazon S3 related resources in StackSets, while another group can only access Amazon DynamoDB resources.  

Auto Recovery is an Amazon EC2 feature that is designed to increase instance availability. Auto Recovery is now available for Dedicated Instances in all AWS Regions. You can now automatically recover Dedicated Instances when a system impairment is detected. This feature recovers the instance on different underlying hardware and reduces the need for manual intervention. 

Amazon Neptune — now generally available — is a fast, reliable graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. Neptune supports popular graph models Property Graph and W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF), and their respective query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin 3.3.2 and SPARQL 1.1.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the performance of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) when using subscription filter policies. 

Application Load Balancer now supports authentication of user requests when accessing web-based applications through social Identity Providers such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon or enterprise Identity Providers such as ActiveDirectory and PingFederate. With this, developers can now focus on building applications for their customers by offloading the responsibility of authentication to the Application Load Balancer, while benefiting from its scale, availability, and reliability.

As enterprises are enabling their employees to access cloud-based apps from any location, identity-based security has become even more crucial. With authentication available on Application Load Balancer and integrated with Amazon Cognito, users can now be authenticated through any identity provider that supports OpenID Connect protocol or SAML2.0 or social identity providers such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. If you already have a custom identity provider solution that is OpenID Connect-compatible, Application Load Balancer can also authenticate users by directly connecting with that Identity Provider. To learn more about the feature, please try the Elastic Load Balancing demo.

Support for user authentication in Application Load Balancer with Cognito-supported Identity Providers is available in all AWS regions that are supported by Amazon Cognito. Support for user authentication by directly integrating your OpenID Connect Identity Provider with Application Load Balancer is available in all AWS regions globally except in the China regions (Beijing and Ningxia). To learn more, please visit the Elastic Load Balancing documentation page.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is an industry-standard protocol for securing network connections. You can now use TLS version 1.2 to establish a secure network connection to all editions of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. 

Amazon Rekognition is a deep learning-based computer vision service that makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications. Amazon Rekognition Image and Video are now AWS HIPAA Eligible Services.

This Quick Start is a reference architecture for those who want to deploy the SAS platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Route 53. By deploying the SAS platform on AWS, you get SAS analytics, data visualization, and machine learning capabilities in an AWS-validated environment. The deployment is automated by an AWS CloudFormation template and takes about one hour.

(Updated) You can now use X1 instances to run Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. The X1 instance type offers a higher ratio of memory to vCPU than most other Amazon EC2 instance types.  

(Updated) The X1 and X1e instance types provide a high ratio of memory to vCPU, with X1e providing the highest ratio among Amazon EC2 instance types. You can now use both to run Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle.

AWS CodeBuild now supports builds for the Microsoft Windows Server platform, including a prepackaged build environment for .NET Core 2.0 on Windows. Previously, CodeBuild supported .NET Core on Linux.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Support for Amazon Translate API is now available in the AWS Mobile SDK for Android and iOS. 

With this launch, Amazon Inspector is making it easier to automatically assess your applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices. Inspector has added the ability to run security assessments on your Amazon EC2 instances without having to add tags to your instances. When you create assessment targets, you can now choose an option to include all EC2 instances in your account within the AWS region.

The Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) agent is now digitally signed using PGP and Windows signatures.

You can now configure how Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) downloads container images from a container registry in order to speed up container launch times.

You can now develop your AWS Elastic Beanstalk applications using Apache Tomcat v8.5. Tomcat v8.5 adds improved performance, stability, with other notable highlights including support for HTTP/2 and using OpenSSL for TLS support with JSSE connectors.

AWS Storage Gateway now supports NovaStor DataCenter versions 6 and 7 with the Tape Gateway virtual tape library (VTL). Tape Gateway helps you move your tape-based backup and archiving workflows to the AWS cloud easily, using applications such as NovaStor DataCenter. With Tape Gateway, you backup application data locally to an appliance, which then moves the data to AWS and stores it in a VTL backed by durable Amazon S3 storage. Then, you can easily archive backups to Amazon Glacier for long-term retention on durable, low-cost storage, with the ability to retrieve virtual tapes in three-to-five hours.

Application Load Balancers now support a slow start mode that allows you to add new targets without overwhelming them with a flood of requests. With the slow start mode, targets warm up before accepting their fair share of requests based on a ramp-up period that you specify.

Slow start is very useful for applications that depend on cache and need a warm-up period before being able to respond to requests with optimal performance.

Slow start mode can be enabled by target group and can be configured for a duration of 30 seconds to 15 minutes. The load balancer linearly increases the number of requests sent to a new target in a target group up to its fair share during the slow start ramp-up window.

Slow start is available today for all existing and new Application Load Balancers in all AWS public regions. You can get started using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDK. To learn more, see slow start mode.

You can now run your training jobs with the built-in Amazon SageMaker algorithms up to 35% faster with Pipe input mode. Using Pipe input mode, your training job streams data directly from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to the algorithm container on the training instances, to provide faster start times for training jobs and better throughput. For example, benchmarks indicated start times improved by up to 10 minutes on an 78GB file, with throughput twice as fast in some benchmarks. 

Hello! Bonjour! 안녕하세요! 你好! こんにちは! Hallo! Ciao! Hola! Olá!

Today, AWS made the AWS Organizations console available in French, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. The availability of the Organizations console in nine total languages - English was previously available - supports our increasingly international customer base for organization administration.

You can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) server-side encryption (SSE) integrated with the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) in 13 additional regions. The addition of SSE helps you to protect sensitive data with encrypted queues.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports PostgreSQL major version 10 in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. PostgreSQL 10 includes various new features including native table partitioning, support for improved parallelism in query execution, ICU collation support, column group statistics, enhanced postgres_fdw extension, and many more. Additionally, this release includes an upgraded version of the PLV8 extension and will have huge pages enabled by default.

AWS AppSync has expanded regional availability footprint now to the EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) are now available in the China (Ningxia) region operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co. Ltd. (NWCD).

Amazon ECS is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS. Amazon ECS eliminates the need for you to install and operate your own container orchestration software, manage and scale a cluster of virtual machines, or schedule containers on those virtual machines. For more information, visit the Amazon ECS product page.

Amazon ECR is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), simplifying your development to production workflow. Amazon ECR eliminates the need to operate your own container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure. Amazon ECR hosts your images in a secure, highly available, and scalable architecture allowing you to reliably deploy containers for your applications. For more information, visit the Amazon ECR product page.

Amazon ECS and Amazon ECR are available in the AWS China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet and AWS China (Ningxia) region operated by NWCD.

You can now configure the MySQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora to publish general logs, slow query logs, and error logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Previously, you could only publish audit logs.

Starting today, AWS Batch is available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region via AWS CLI. Console support will be available on May 30.

You can now monitor the performance and health of your Amazon Redshift cluster with two new Amazon CloudWatch metrics, Query Throughput and Query Duration. These metrics monitor Redshift cluster performance and provide insights to adjust workload management settings to improve query performance. We have also improved the user interface to view the Query Performance Data on the console.

The AWS Quick Start team, solutions architects, and Contact Center partner segment team, in collaboration with AWS partners, are pleased to announce five new Amazon Connect integrations that offer contact center solutions: 

You can now use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) service discovery to discover and connect Amazon ECS tasks that use the bridge and host networking modes. This makes it easy to start using ECS service discovery for containerized applications running on Amazon ECS.

Amazon Macie now offers a new dashboard making it easier for you to identify Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets accessible to the Internet as well as Amazon S3 objects with overly permissive access permissions. 

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment is now available, offering an environment for customers to easily test beta, release candidate, and early production versions of PostgreSQL database engine software with the convenience and flexibility of Amazon RDS.

You can now use AWS Budgets as a resource in your AWS CloudFormation templates, stacks, and StackSets.

Alexa for Business introduces Alexa Smart Scheduling Assistant, which lets Alexa manage your users’ calendars. Users can now schedule 1:1 meetings and move meetings in their calendar using their voice. The Alexa Smart Scheduling Assistant automatically looks for free time on meeting attendees' calendars, which saves your users the time and effort of doing this manually. Your users can also move their meetings using Alexa so they can quickly update their calendar without having to break from the task they were doing.

You can now access all of the example Jupyter notebooks provided through Amazon SageMaker from a new “SageMaker Examples” tab on the Jupyter interface console to help you get started using machine learning even faster. These examples cover topics like machine learning fundamentals, in-depth instruction on specific algorithms and frameworks, advanced SageMaker features, and integration with Apache Spark. Until now, you had to navigate to each directory in the Jupyter interface to look at the examples, duplicate the notebook, and move it to your home directory to customize. Now, with the addition of the nbexamples plug-in, Amazon SageMaker extends the Jupyter interface to make discovering the sample notebooks a more streamlined process. From the list of notebooks grouped by category, you can preview a read-only copy of the notebook to examine it in more detail before use. Once you’ve selected the notebook most applicable to your machine learning solution, a single click in the Jupyter interface copies it to the home directory on your Jupyter notebook instance with the name you choose. You can then modify the notebook for your particular use case and run it to build, train, and deploy your machine learning model. 

AWS CloudFormation now offers FIPS 140-2 validated API endpoints in US regions, making it easier for customers to use the service for regulated workloads. These endpoints terminate TLS sessions using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic software module. Support for FIPS 140-2 validated endpoints is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon). See the Regions and Endpoints page for the endpoint URL details.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) bare metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the processor and memory resources of the underlying server. These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to the hardware feature set (such as Intel® VT-x), or for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements. Bare metal instances are built on the Nitro system, a collection of AWS-built hardware offload and server protection components that come together to securely provide high performance networking and storage resources to EC2 instances. Bare metal instances were announced for preview at AWS re:Invent 2017, and are now generally available with the EC2 Storage Optimized I3 instance family in the form of i3.metal instances.

Amazon Cognito now makes it easier for developers to add OIDC-providers that are currently not built-in to the service console, like Salesforce or Ping Identity. Lengthy sign-up forms create friction for the registration and conversion of users. This new Cognito feature simplifies the registration process by allowing users to login with an existing OpenID account into a User Pool.

Amazon EC2 C5d instances deliver C5 instances equipped with local NVMe-based SSD block level storage physically connected to the host server. These instances are a great fit for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage like video encoding, image manipulation and other forms of media processing. It will also benefit applications that need temporary storage of data, such as batch and log processing and applications that need caches and scratch files. With the option of NVMe-based SSD instance storage, C5 customers now have additional storage choices for their most compute-intensive workloads.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) in AWS GovCloud (US) now reports the time stamp when an IAM user last used their access key.  

Starting today, users can access Amazon Chime from their web browser. The new Amazon Chime web application makes it easy to join meetings from any device with a supported browser, including those running Linux or ChromeOS, without downloading or installing a client application. The web application lets users use Amazon Chime on more devices, and helps them stay connected and productive.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now makes it easier for you to control access to your AWS resources by using the AWS organization of IAM principals (users and roles). You can use a new condition key, aws:PrincipalOrgID, in your permissions policy to require all IAM principals (users and roles) accessing your resources, to be from an account in your organization.  

Today, AWS made it easier to manage your secrets from the console by making the AWS Secrets Manager console available in two additional languages - Italian and Traditional Chinese.  

Amazon Inspector expanded security assessments to include Amazon Linux 2018.03 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE), Security Best Practices, and Runtime Behavior Analysis. To run security assessments, simply install the Amazon Inspector Agent on the desired EC2 instance, configure your assessment in the Inspector console, and run your assessment.

PostgreSQL read replicas on Amazon RDS now support Outbound Network Access and can execute queries using the postgres_fdw extension to access remote servers. The postgres_fdw extension lets you access and modify data stored in other PostgreSQL servers as if they were tables within the RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. This is already supported on primary PostgreSQL instances, but offloading read only queries from remote servers to read replicas will reduce resource usage on the primary instance.

You can now access AWS CodeBuild from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. Many AWS customers run their applications within a VPC for security or isolation reasons. Previously, you could connect to CodeBuild from your VPC using an internet gateway or VPN connection. With VPC endpoints, no public IP addresses are required and traffic between the VPC and CodeBuild does not leave the Amazon network.

Elastic Beanstalk environment health events can now be streamed to CloudWatch Logs. It enables you to review and debug the historical health changes of your running applications in Elastic Beanstalk.

AWS Step Functions now supports higher throughput workflows, making it easier to coordinate applications with high event rates and variable loads. Starting today, throughput has increased from 400 state transitions per second to 1,000 state transitions per second with burst capacity of 5,000 state transitions. The default start rate for AWS Step Functions state machine executions has also increased from 25 per second to 200 per second, with burst capacity of up to 1,000 starts in select regions.

Amazon RDS now offers Multi-AZ support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Mirroring technology with additional improvements to meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.

In December 2015, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) released service last accessed data, which helps you identify overly permissive policies attached to an IAM entity (a user, group, or role). Now, we have extended service last accessed data to support four additional regions: EU (London), Canada (Central), US East (Ohio), and EU (Paris) AWS Regions.

Starting today, the AWS VPN service supports custom Pre-Shared Keys (PSKs) and inside tunnel IP CIDR blocks for your VPN connection. These new features allow you to better self-manage their VPNs, avoid inside tunnel IP address conflicts, and enable support for additional devices. These features are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. 

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Starting today, you can apply to participate in a developer preview that allows you to use eight English (U.S.) Amazon Polly voices to narrate your Alexa skills.

Starting now, AWS IoT 1-Click is available for all customers. AWS IoT 1-Click is a new AWS IoT service that enables simple devices to trigger AWS Lambda functions, for executing an action. Supported devices on AWS IoT 1-Click are ready to securely connect to the cloud right out of the box, without additional device configuration. This makes it easy for cloud developers to deploy these devices into their applications right away without writing custom firmware or writing device-level code.

AWS CodeCommit now enables you to restrict who can commit changes to the master branch or any branch of your choosing. Previously, you could control who can make changes to a repository but not to specific branches within a repository. Now, you can define which actions are allowed on a branch and who has permission to perform those actions. This makes it easy to set-up a workflow where only approved users can merge pull requests or commit changes to a sensitive branch.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 X1e instances are available in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region.

The AWS Amplify JavaScript Library introduces service worker capabilities to enable high-quality, cloud-powered Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) for web and mobile. Developers who want to enable PWA features in their apps can use AWS Amplify's built-in utility class to register their service workers, enable and utilize web push APIs, and monitor service worker life-cycle events with Analytics. Developers can also integrate other cloud features such as authorization, real-time data, and user storage through AWS Amplify's category of operations.

AWS announces the General Availability of Amazon Sumerian, a managed service that allows developers to create and publish augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and 3D applications quickly and easily without requiring any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with advanced optimizations for TensorFlow 1.8 to deliver higher-performance training for Amazon EC2 C5 and P3 instances.

AWS Systems Manager now makes it easy to collect inventory from all managed instances in a region. Now, in a single click, all new and existing managed instances within a region in your AWS account are configured to collect inventory using the AWS Systems Manager Inventory service. The instance will automatically start collecting inventory based on your AWS Systems Manager Inventory configuration when there is a new managed instance in your account.  

You can now control your Amazon WorkSpaces environment running on your iPad when you use a SwiftPoint GT mouse. This launch enables precise pointer control in your WorkSpace when you’re using an iPad with a SwiftPoint GT mouse. To access Amazon WorkSpaces from your iPad, or other supported client devices, download the Amazon WorkSpaces app. Once you have the Amazon WorkSpaces iPad app installed, simply enable Bluetooth on both your iPad and SwiftPoint GT mouse and pair them. Then log into your WorkSpace, and you can use the mouse just like you would on a PC or laptop. You can get more detail on mouse set up and support in our documentation.

Today, Espressif Systems’ ESP32-DevKitC & ESP-WROVER-KIT are qualified for Amazon FreeRTOS. You can now take advantage of Amazon FreeRTOS features and benefits for microcontrollers using the development boards from Espressif. This enables you to easily and securely connect your ESP32-based devices to AWS cloud services like AWS IoT Core or to edge devices running AWS Greengrass. ESP32-DevKitC is a small-sized development board, and ESP-WROVER-KIT is a development board that has support for LCD, MicroSD card, and USB JTAG interface. They come in two variants, either with the ESP-WROOM-32 or ESP32-WROVER module.

You can get started with Espressif’s ESP32 and Amazon FreeRTOS today by downloading the code from GitHub.

Today we are announcing the availability of License Included (LI) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server version 1709 and 1803 for Amazon EC2, providing customers with an easy and flexible way to get up and running with the latest versions of Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel release. These versions of Windows Server include new enhancements such as smaller disk footprint, Kubernetes support, and Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL), and are best suited for use cases including building modern container and micro-services based Windows applications.

We have released AWS CloudHSM client packages for new operating systems, including Microsoft Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2 and 2016, Amazon Linux 2, CentOS 6 and 7, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7. This expands on existing support for Amazon Linux and Ubuntu.

You can view the complete list of AWS CloudHSM-supported operating systems and download latest client and SDK packages, from the CloudHSM Version History page.

AWS CloudHSM offers you cost effective hardware key management at cloud scale for sensitive and regulated workloads. You can generate and use encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated hardware security modules (HSMs) on the AWS Cloud. CloudHSM integrates with your applications using industry-standard APIs, such as PKCS#11, Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE), and Microsoft CryptoNG (CNG).  You can learn more about AWS CloudHSM here.

Starting today, you can use Node.js v8.10 to develop your functions in Lambda@Edge, in addition to the currently supported Node.js v6.10 runtime.

Node.js v8.10, the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node, uses the new V8 6.0 engine, that provides better performance when compared to the previous LTS version 6.x. In addition, Node.js v8.10 supports new features such as async/await, which is a new way of handling asynchronous operations in Node.js. This enables you to write simpler, easier, and cleaner code for non-blocking calls. You can read this blog post for more details on the benefits of async/await feature introduced in Node.js v8.10.

To get started, you can simply upload your Node.js code as an AWS Lambda function through the AWS CLI or Lambda console, and select the Node.js 8.10 runtime. If you have existing Node.js functions, you can switch to the new runtime by making any required code changes to ensure compatibility with the new runtime and editing their function configuration to set the runtime to Node.js 8.10.

To learn more about Lambda@Edge, visit the product page. For more information on Lambda’s Node.js programming model, you can refer to the documentation.

 

We’re excited to announce the availability of Lumberyard Beta 1.14. With over 200 improvements, fixes, and new features, this release includes a major update to the game engine’s visual scripting environment, new component entities, and more. Some highlights include:

Real-Time IoT Device Monitoring with Kinesis Data Analytics is a solution that can help you more easily monitor your IoT device connectivity and activity in real-time. This solution automatically provisions the services necessary to record and visualize device connectivity and activity metrics for your IoT devices. Real-Time IoT Device Monitoring with Kinesis Data Analytics is designed to provide a framework for visualizing metrics in real-time, allowing you to focus on adding new metrics rather than underlying infrastructure operations.  

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the ability to update your sqlnet.ora parameters. The sqlnet.ora file includes parameters that configure Oracle Net features on Oracle Database servers and clients. Using these parameters, you can modify properties for connections in and out of the database.

We have added support for Apache Parquet and Apache ORC formats in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, so you can stream real-time data into Amazon S3 for cost-effective storage and analytics.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) now supports Memory-Optimized R4 instances for migrations or ongoing replications. R4 instances have more memory per vCPU, and can be used to migrate or replicate workloads that are memory bound, typically with high Transactions per Second (TPS), that need to be migrated in near real time.

Customers that call in to your Amazon Connect contact center can now provide input using their touch-tone keypad for contact flows using an Amazon Lex chatbot. Previously, customers could interact with Amazon Lex chatbots in Amazon Connect contact centers through voice input. Keypad input provides greater flexibility for your customers to now choose how they want to interact with your contact center, in a format that is most comfortable for their environment. For example, keypad input is often preferred when calling from a location with an abundance of ambient noise, or to ensure privacy when in a public space.

Keypad input will work with your existing Amazon Lex chatbots that you've already created for your contact center. Amazon Lex interprets the spoken utterance or dual-tone-multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) digits entered on a keypad, and uses them to understand the caller’s intent.

You can use Amazon Lex chatbots with Amazon Connect in the US-East (Northern Virginia) AWS region. To learn more about using Amazon Lex chatbots with Amazon Connect, visit the Amazon Lex Chatbot web page. There are no additional Amazon Connect charges to use Amazon Lex chatbots in your contact flows, but you will be billed for Amazon Lex usage. You can find out more about Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud contact center, by visiting the Amazon Connect website.

Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility now offers a quick way to recover from user errors, such as dropping the wrong table or deleting the wrong row. Backtrack allows you to move your database to a prior point in time without needing to restore from a backup, and it completes within seconds, even for large databases.

Note    This Quick Start is no longer available. See https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart for our latest Quick Start catalog.

This Quick Start automatically deploys CloudStax NoSQL DB for Apache Cassandra into a highly available architecture on AWS, using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for container orchestration and CloudStax FireCamp for stateful service management. 

The IoT Device Simulator is a solution that that enables customers to create and simulate hundreds of virtual connected devices, without having to configure and manage physical devices, or develop time-consuming scripts. The solution also includes a pre-built automotive module that you can use to simulate vehicle telemetry data using pre-defined device types. The automotive module uses a power train simulation model to generate simulated vehicle telemetry data.

Amazon GameLift helps you quickly deploy, scale, and manage dedicated game servers in the cloud at a low cost and deliver low-latency, multiplayer game experiences globally. Typical multiplayer games use only 50% of their peak server capacity on average, meaning that half of the time the game servers have no active players. To reduce wasted capacity and costs, Amazon GameLift can automatically turn off game servers when they are not needed and add new game servers when more players arrive, based on rules you set.

Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers now support resource- and tag-based permissions. This enables customers to implement fine-grained access controls on their load balancers using IAM policies.

Prior to this announcement, customers could only create user- or group-level policies to restrict API actions on the load balancers in their account. Customers were forced to give users all-or-nothing control over the resources. For instance, a user policy to allow DeleteLoadBalancer API would permit the user to delete any load balancer in the account.

With this release, policies can be applied on specific load balancer resources identified by their ARNs or tags. This is supported for all types of load-balancer resources i.e. load balancer, listener, rule and target groups.

Learn more by reading the load balancer user guide. You can also subscribe to our discussion forum to get launch announcements and post your questions.

Today, we launched the AWS Machine Learning Competency Program for Consulting Partners. This program showcases APN Partners with deep expertise in Machine Learning on AWS that can provide solutions for AWS customers that enable machine learning and data science workflows. With this new AWS Competency, AWS customers can find an APN Partner that will help them utilize Machine Learning services and tools on AWS to add intelligence to any application.

AWS Machine Learning Partners have gone under a strict validation of their capabilities to demonstrate technical proficiency and proven customer success in AWS Machine Learning.

To learn more about the AWS Machine Learning Consulting Partners, click here. 

You can now use AWS Glue in the EU (London) AWS region.

This Quick Start builds an architecture for blue-green deployment to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk environment. It creates a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline using AWS CodePipeline for a cost-effective, fault-tolerant architecture. The deployment is automated by an AWS CloudFormation template and takes about 15 minutes.

Amazon Cloud Directory is now available in the Canada (Central) Region.

The PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora is now available in 13 regions. With the addition of the Asia Pacific (Seoul) AWS Region, you have a new option for database placement, availability, and scalability.

You can now use an Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (SSM) parameter in AWS CloudFormation to launch EC2 instances with the latest ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

Copies of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots encrypted under a custom Customer Managed Key (CMK) are now incremental. This means that when you make a new copy of an EBS Snapshot, only the modified chunks compared to the previous copy of the same EBS Snapshot are saved in the new copy. This minimizes the time required to copy the EBS Snapshot and saves on storage costs by not duplicating data for such EBS Snapshots encrypted with custom CMK. This is similar to what we already support for copies of unencrypted EBS Snapshots and copies of EBS Snapshots encrypted under your default CMK.  

AWS Step Functions is now available in two additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Seoul) and US West (N. California). AWS Step Functions makes it easier to coordinate the components of distributed systems, serverless applications, and microservices using visual workflows.

Amazon GuardDuty now allows you to setup automatic archiving when creating a findings filter. This is useful when you have a unique use case in your environment that generates many similar findings, or in situations where you have reviewed a certain class of findings and don’t want to be alerted again.

Starting today, you can create AWS Auto Scaling scaling plans using AWS CloudFormation, a service that allows you to easily provision and update a set of related AWS resources in an orderly and predictable fashion.

Today, we are announcing the capability to retrieve latest instance console output throughout the lifecycle of Amazon EC2 instances. 

AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog, which lists over 4,200 software listings from popular software vendors, has announced that enterprise customers can now leverage Enterprise Contract for AWS Marketplace to procure software quickly, and take the friction out of contract negotiations. Enterprise Contract for AWS Marketplace gives large enterprise customers the option to purchase software solutions using a standardized contract template under which participating sellers have agreed to offer their products. The Enterprise Contract for AWS Marketplace is designed to be a comprehensive end user license agreement between software buyers and sellers that include commonly negotiated clauses like liability, venue, IP protection, data handling, warranty, indemnity, GDPR, etc.